I live in the UK, currently in London. I make live art, performance lectures, artistic interventions, participatory experiences and live role-playing games, often focusing on communities and audiences outside of conventional gallery or performance spaces, although I’ve also exhibited and performed throughout the world in theatres, festivals like London Data Week, CPH:DOX, ISEA and La Biennale di Venezia (AKA Venice Biennale), and art galleries like Photographers Gallery in London, Kunstal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Open Data Institute in London, Tate Liverpool, MUSAC Léon, Art on the Underground, Detroit Institute of Arts, Wysing Arts Centre, FACT in Liverpool, OCAT Shenzhen, and many many many more.

I like folklore, magic, silly costumes, museums, absurdity, the uncanny valley, doing things that help people think, improving the world incrementally, and making machines and systems do things their creators wouldn’t approve of. The latest updates about my work are in the Blog/News section, or scroll down this page. Linktr.ee for shortcuts to other, offsite stuff. Contact me using this form. Apart from my native English I speak (in descending order of competence) French, German, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, with fragments of others like Norwegian or Welsh. I’ve done some of my shows in these languages, and would love to do so again.

I’ve collaborated extensively with scientists and technologists, particularly in the social sciences. I often use scientific and academic research methods in developing my projects, and also as part of my other art-adjacent work as a (mainly qualitative, but I can do numbers too) researcher, educator, producer and activist in livelihoods, equity and access for artists from marginalised groups, especially LGBTQ artists, disabled artists, self-taught artists and artists from low income backgrounds… just like me. Sometimes I use the same anthropological and ethnographic methods satirically and pataphysically in my art work.

Now, and recently…

March 2024: I can at last publicise dates for the exhibitions of Unbuilt Environments, my video installation built in Unreal Engine about the utopias and dystopias of disabled people. It’s on show in London from 16th March 2024, and in Copenhagen from 13th March 2024. If you’d like to visit, get all the information you need in this post from the news section. Some new images from the still in development British Fusion. April 2024 update: Unbuilt Environments has its own dedicated page now, with stills and exhibition photographs from the London show at Hoxton Hall. Video clips coming soon.

December 2023: Working on an exhibition to be shown in different forms in East London and in Copenhagen in March 2024: see some work in progress stills here. Also added some photos from my tour for the Photographers’ Gallery that took place in September.

May 2023: Site visual and content updates, starting with some videos from the British Fusion flying saucer project. Videos from some older projects will be coming along shortly too.

April 2023: Not much new stuff on the site because I’m working hard on a few things that will be happening later on in the year. All I can say for now is there will be archery and other outdoor fun, Unreal Engine 5, interventions in the built environment by disabled people, and the mobility scooter tours are back and badass again. Check the site soon for more details…

2022: Back at b-side this September, as is now traditional. Data-driven work in progress at the Southbank Centre Archive in London. A research residency in Bristol at Pervasive Media Studio/Watershed: Read about British Fusion. Also an iconoclastic commission at Tate Liverpool. Currently (2022) DoxBox‘s physical incarnation lives at The Open Data Institute in London, part of the exhibition Copy That? Surplus Data in an Age of Repetitive Duplication.

2021: The Portland Office for Imaginary History was open again for YEAR FIVE (first commissioned 2016!), and I diversified into the property market with The Dorchester and Poundbury Office for Imaginary Housing. DoxBox trustbot returned for more performances throughout the year.

2020: A slight recovery: DoxBox trustbot chatted to people all over the world– Europe, the USA, Africa and Australia– via Electric Dreams Festival of Online Storytelling in August, online with thousands of attendees at the Open Data Institute September and November, and a very queer (in every sense of the word) LARP for the Brontë Parsonage Museum in West Yorkshire.

2018-2019 I was research artist in residence at The Open Data Institute in London, developing DoxBox trustbot: a tech drag AI for playing with digital ethics, with performances in London at Furtherfield’s Citizen Sci Fi Future Fair and the ODI’s Annual Summit. The Portland Office for Imaginary History returned, I performed live a lot, compiled a-n’s online resource on mental health, and I was part of the Bank Job team, a community arts project about money and debt in the east London area I actually live in, which won the Artquest Workweek Prize for artist-led projects and wrote off £1.2 million of local people’s debts. I’m also in the feature-length Bank Job documentary that is available to buy and stream. You can read my writing about independent artists and artist-led projects in every issue of Sluice magazine.

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Highlights of my career so far include the publication of two novels, being artist in residence at the University of Edinburgh’s Genomics Policy & Research Forum, exhibiting my films at La Biennale di Venezia, being awarded the Berwick Gymnasium Artist Fellowship by English Heritage and Arts Council England, everything I’ve done in Japan (日本は私の好きな場所です！ 私が帰るように私を招待してください…) and most recently being artist in residence at the Open Data Institute in London, researching and building DoxBox trustbot.

I’ve been an artist in residence in England, Scotland, Wales, Norway and China: always a properly paid and supported artist in residence, incidentally, not the type you pay for yourself which is just going on holiday really, isn’t it? Not that I don’t like holidays. Maybe I’ll have one someday. I also accidentally set up the planet Earth’s number one online source for the full and unexpurgated erotic letters of James Joyce. Subsequently exploited for clicks and clout by everyone from the Paris Review and The Guardian to Buzzfeed and Funny or Die, not to mention a “performance maker” who got pretty much a whole show at a London theatre out of it without a word of thanks to me, which really takes the piss when that’s literally my job. You’re welcome, Earth. I’m still glad I did it, though.

Many of my projects are the result of extensive research in particular places, subjects and communities, sometimes over the course of many years. Read a 2011 interview with me by fellow writer and artist Iain Aitch here or one I did in 2014 for the exhibition Lecture-Performance here.

I was a founder of Market Project: professional and economic research by artists (2010-2013), which was funded by Arts Council England. Until the gallery’s closure in 2012 I was an Associate Artist at ArtSway, having worked with them in various capacities since 2002. For most of my career I’ve worked collaboratively with other artists, writers, designers, actors, architects, scientists and audiences and I still do. I constantly seek new opportunities to make, exhibit and talk about my work, to perform or do readings, and to forge new and lasting connections with interesting people or places, so I really welcome enquiries and communication.

I post regularly on Twitter, and it’s still a good place to reach me and ask questions if you want to, even though obviously Space Karen has ruined it and filled it with Nazis. For that reason I’m also on Bluesky. You can also contact me via the BIO/CV menu at the top of this page. My critical writing about contemporary art has been published by Axisweb, Disability Arts Online, Unlimited, a-n, Garageland, The Guardian, and Sluice magazine; I’ve written a column about artist-led spaces and the independent/non-profit sector of the arts for every single issue of Sluice since it started!